Högskoleexpansionen i Sverige

During the last two decades, the Swedish education system for higher education has been reformed and expanded. During this period of change both bourgeois and social democratic parties have had the governmental power. Therefore, the following paper seeks to examine which party-political differences there are in the Swedish higher education from 1991 to 2014. This paper answers that question by qualitatively describing the ideas behind the policies in the purpose of finding the party-political differences. The ideas are studied through a tool for text analysis that consists of three different dimensions regarding party-political differences. The dimensions are investments, regional dissemination and expanded recruitment. The material on which the dimensions are applied are budget bills from different government periods. The result of the idea analysis points out that the most central differences between social democratic parties and bourgeois parties are that social democrats have constant ideas about the labour market and sustainability in their education policies. The bourgeois most frequent ideas are about quality, the individual and self-determination and freedom for the universities. Furthermore, both parties have ideas about internationalization, but the social democrats advocate international cooperation and the bourgeois emphasize international competitiveness